Computer fails to boot from Harddrive 1

[Keyboy]

Hi,

I am running W Vista Home Premium on a Dell Inspiron D530S. Everything is original. Two days ago when I started up the computer, the screen went blank and a message came up indicating that the boot from the floppy disk had failed and I had a choice to press F1 to continue or F10 to enter setup. If I press F1 the computer boots properly from the HD. I shutdown and entered setup. Everything I can see on the boot order configuration screen shows that HD is 1st, CD is 2nd and the other two are disabled. I don't have a floppy installed so I can't explain why it tries to boot from it first.

I repeated the above events several times with no improvement and also replaced the CMOS battery which also made no improvement.

Does anyone have an idea why this is happening and how I might fix the problem?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[rclarke250]

scan for malware, and viruses. After that, you could look at msconfig and look at the startup, and win.ini and boot.sys to see what is happening. Just type msconfig in the start bar, and select it.

 

[Keyboy]

Hi,

Scanned for malware and viruses and found nothing. msconfig looks fine and points to the HD for boot. Not sure how to look at win.ini and boot.sys. A search didn't find them.

After discussion with family figured out that this change back to booting from floppy resulted from a loss of power crash.

Also see that a floppy icon shows up on the Computer list of drives. I looked for a restore point but found none.

Any more ideas?

Thanks for your help!

 

[cdogg]

I don't think you need to troubleshoot this as a Windows issue. Looks like a problem with a BIOS configuration setting, since the F1 prompt appears before Windows loads, and pressing it allows Windows to boot normally.

I don't work on Dells as often as I used to, but a quick google search turned this up:

[tab]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOegio0Pi64

Sounds like the issue you were having. If that's not the same error message and those tips don't help, then post back with the EXACT error word-for-word.



-Carl
"The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it's twice as big as it needs to be."

[tab][navy]For this site's posting policies, click [/navy]here.

 

[Keyboy]

Hi,

While the video was for another operating system it led me to find that there are 2 places in the setup that need to be changed for the Floppy disk to be removed. Once I learned that I found where I had to make the changes and everything is fine now.

Thanks again!

 

[cdogg]

Good deal!